ON the last day of the journey she wakened at early dawn. The old Mariposa, coupled to the end of the train, rocked and careened over the single track. A fine dust had penetrated even through the double windows and settled in a gray film on her small and frivolous pumps on the floor. Later on, when the train stopped to let the eastern express pass like an explosion, she could hear the preparations for breakfast going on, the cook rattling pans in his cubicle and old William, who had been on the car since her grandfather's time, laying the table.
Once she even heard the shower bath going, and knew that either her father or Herbert was preparing for the day, taking advantage of the stop to do so. It was not easy to bathe on the train. There was a story that once old Lucius himself had been hurled in puribus naturalibus out of the shower and into the corridor, and was only saved by his bulk from going through a window!
The water ran for a long time. That would be Herbert. He was frightfully neat and clean, was Herbert. In the new detachment that had been hers since she wakened she considered Herbert, so tidy in mind and body, so well-mannered. Neat mannered, she said to herself, and smiled over it. And of course that was something to be said for a young man who brushed his teeth every night before he went to bed.
Suppose she married him? After all she would have to marry some one. She had played around long enough. She was twenty-three. "Mrs. Forrest." "Mrs. Herbert Forrest," she said to herself, and did not dislike the sound of it.
Herbert was in love with her. She had known it for a long time, and Herbert knew she knew it. Even her father and mother knew it. She could almost have repeated their conversations about it.
"After all," her father would say, "the boy has character, and money isn't essential."
"But she could have done so much better, if she only would."
"What do you mean, better? He comes of an excellent family; he's got no bad habits, and he's a worker. I can't stand those five-o'clock tea Johnnies who hang around her. Lot of idle young degenerates!"
It was only her Aunt Bessie who had objected to Herbert, and that with her usual frankness.
"Personally I think he's a stuffed shirt," she said vulgarly, "If I had my life to live over again"
"Which thank God you haven't," said Henry.
"—I would pick a man and not a rubber stamp," persisted Aunt Bessie, valiantly mixing her metaphors and ignoring the interruption. "Of course, if Kay cares for him, that's different. Do you?"
"I don't know," said Kay. "He's rather sweet, in a way."
"Oh, good heavens! So's a stick of candy!" had been Bessie's retort to that, and she had stuck a cigarette in a long jeweled holder and lighted it, and then wandered disdainfully out of the room.
For some time the train had been climbing through a dreary desolate region. It was bleak, dry, incredibly broken and eroded. Save for the prairie dogs by the track, sitting up and yapping at the train, their small tails jerking as they squeaked, there was no life whatever. Except once when she saw a dog. It ran a short distance, looking back over its shoulder, and then sat down on a hill top and watched the passing monster. She did not know that it was a coyote. But it did begin to dawn on her that this was the eighty miles of bad land before one got to the river, and she became conscious of a certain excitement. One need not see the railroad and the water tanks; one could look beyond and watch that years-ago drama; and as if to complete her picture she caught a glimpse of a lone horseman loping over the sage brush.
It was ugly, but it was beautiful too. It was strange, grotesque and wonderful.
When Nora came in to help her dress she asked her if she liked it.
"Like it?" said Nora. "It's the worst I've ever seen, Miss Kay. Not a tree! Nothing!"
She wandered out to breakfast. Her mother was already there, and Herbert, and old William was pulling out her chair. William, who had been with her grandfather since the Mariposa had come, shiny and new, out of the railroad shops, and who had served the great men of his time when they had accompanied old Lucius west, for bear and deer hunting in the daytime and poker games at night.
"Morning, everybody," said Kay. "Well, William, we're almost there!"
"Yes, miss," said William, grinning. "I shorely am glad to get back. Grape fruit or melon, miss?"
"Grape fruit, please. Have you looked outside, you two? It's rather wonderful."
"It looks frightfully dusty," said her mother. "I've told Nora to pin some more sheets over your clothes, Kay."
"Don't you see anything but dust, Herbert?"
Herbert saw that something more was expected of him. Personally he regarded it as the land that God forgot, but now he stared out of a window.
"I suppose," he said vaguely, "that if one cared for that sort of thing"
She ate her grapefruit rather sulkily. How odd they were! Her mother must know that old story, but there she sat delicately sipping her coffee and attempting to read the head lines of a paper from the Junction as it lay by her father's plate. No one ever opened the paper until her father had read it. When Henry came in she made, however, one more attempt.
"Father?"
"Yes," absently.
"Isn't this the desert they had to cross with the cattle, before they got to" She hesitated. It seemed sacrilege to offer them the valley. "—to the end of the trip?"
"What cattle?"
"Grandfather's."
He glanced out, as if for the first time perceiving that there was something outside.
"Maybe. You have to remember that I wasn't present. Better sell that C. and L., Herbert. I see they've passed their dividend again."
"All right, sir. I can wire if you like."
No answer being forthcoming, Herbert decided to wire and went on with his breakfast. Now and then he raised his head and glanced at Kay, but she was looking past him, out the window.
"Marmalade?"
"No, thanks."
He was slightly worried. He had annoyed Kay, he knew, but he could not think how. Surely what he had said about this hideous country could not matter. He had brushed himself carefully that morning, but already there was a gray film of dust on his shoulders. Alkali, probably, and his hands felt dry and rough. He dipped them in his finger bowl.
"Anything this morning, sir?"
"Nothing but what I've told you."
Herbert was Mr. Dowling's secretary. He was really much more than that, but that was his official position. He drew a nice salary and saved a part of it, and had just taken on life insurance. He had very firm ideas about life insurance, even if a man's wife should come into money and never need it. One owed it to oneself to leave an estate.
But to be fair to him, he was not considering Kay for her money. He had as firm ideas about marriage as about life insurance, and he had analyzed Kay carefully before he fell in love with her. After that, first methodically and then as nearly recklessly as he ever did anything, he found himself very much in love indeed. So much so that to his annoyance he found it interfering with his tidy daily routine, which had been, until this happened, as follows:
| 7:30 | Rise, bathe and shave. |
| 8:00 | Breakfast. |
| 8:30 | Leave for office. |
| 9:00 | Arrive office. |
And in the afternoons:
| 4:30 | Leave office. |
| 5:00 to 6:00 | Exercise, Y. M. C. A. (Except Saturday afternoon. Golf or squash, depending on the season.) |
| 6:00 | Home to dress. |
| 8:00 | Dine (Generally out). |
| 11:00 | Bed and sleep. |
Kay had managed to shoot this schedule to pieces. Not that she had tried to; rather sweet was the nearest she came to loving him. But it is one thing to put down eleven o'clock as the hour for sleep and another to achieve it, and Herbert was already behind his schedule considerably. He had dejected moments when he wondered if he would ever catch up.
So he followed Kay out onto the platform that morning, and resigned himself to dust, cinders and a wind which made his eyes water. He even, after a time, stated that he believed that, if water were put on the ground it would grow things. And Kay relaxed and even laughed.
"You are really a nice person, Herbert," she said.
He flushed. "Do you think that, Kay?" he asked, "or are you just saying it to please me?"
"I mean it."
He turned and looked at her.
"And that's all you do mean," he said, with unexpected shrewdness. "I see. Well"
He did not finish. Henry came out on the platform.
Kay was quite sure she recognized the river when they came to it, but it disappointed her. It flowed sluggishly between deep eroded banks, a narrow yellow stream in the center of a dried bed. There was nothing to tell her of what a river it was in the spring, when the snow on the distant mountains began to melt; how it spread incredibly and carried away bridges and what not, and how unwary cattle and even people sank then in its quicksands, and died.
"Imagine drinking that!" said Herbert as they rattled across the bridge.
"But suppose you had been eighty miles without water."
"Eighty! Why eighty?"
But she did not answer. She had somehow expected that when one crossed the river one was at once in a green valley, filled with peace and rest, but there was no appreciable difference. It was only later in the afternoon that a change became apparent, that the country ceased to be broken and began to roll, and far away mountains loomed blue against the sky.
The train was climbing slowly up the great plateau. Now and then it stopped, and milk cans, trunks, and crates of chickens were put on and off. The sun was blazing. Here and there Kay on the rear platform began to see small cultivated spots, alfalfa, grain already turning yellow. She vaguely resented them; they were trying to civilize the valley. She saw no pathos then in the shipping pens and the small red grain elevators side by side. She was conscious however of a rising exultation, a peculiar tingling of the blood, a sense of lightness and anticipation. Even of home-coming. And then the train swung out from between two tall buttes and she saw the lights of Ursula.
Always afterwards she was to remember Ursula at twilight, its streets and windows lighted, an impassive Indian with braids standing' under a station lamp, the cool evening air blowing down from the mountains, and behind the town, the purple back drop of the mountains, with one peak higher than the others covered with snow and crowned with glory. And mixed with that was to be her first sight of Tom McNair.
They stood on the car platform; Nora counted the bags, her mother drew her wrap around her, her father looked about.
"Nobody here!" he said.
Then the station agent came along and peered up at them through his glasses.
"Mr. Dowling?"
"That's right."
"No hurry, Mr. Dowling. Take your time. The car's to be taken off here, I understand?"
"Yes. Who's here to get us? Mallory?"
"It's McNair, I think. At least I saw him That you, Tom?"
A tall figure moved forward, touched its Stetson hat, stood immobile. It was an easy casual gesture, even faintly an insolent one. It was as though he said: "I'm McNair, and who the devil are you?"
That was Kay's first sight of Tom McNair. He stepped out of the shadow into the light of a lamp post and into her life with equal nonchalance. At the moment—and indeed for some time—she scarcely existed at all to him.
"What's the girl like?" they asked him that night at the bunk house.
"Like any other girl," he told them, and yawned. "She's a Dowling. That's enough."
Which it was, Henry Dowling being about as popular at that time with the outfit as a rattlesnake in a round-up bed.
But from the time she first saw him Kay was intensely conscious of Tom McNair. Perhaps it was because he typified the valley to her, and her dreams about it. Certainly he was the first embodiment of its romance that she had found. She could hardly have seen, there in the dusk, his darkly handsome face, the broad shoulders and slim waist of which he was so proud. And if, like most cowboys, his soft drawl betrayed his southern origin, he might have had bronchitis for all the use he made of it.
"I'm McNair," he said briefly. "How many are you?"
"Five," said Herbert, who did not care for his manner. "How many do we look like?"
"Plenty, for one car." He glanced at Kay, clutching her jewel case and still staring at him. "You with the party? Better give me that bag."
"It's nothing," said Kay. "I'll carry it."
Perhaps he misunderstood the tightness in her voice, the queer constraint, for he turned on his heel and plunged into the darkness, leaving them to follow as best they could.
"Stiff!" he reflected. "She's Miss Dowling, and I'm to remember it. To hell with her!"
But he was grinning to himself as he tied the luggage with ropes to the sides of the car, and gave orders for the trunks to be sent out the next day. To himself and at himself, for he had meant to be late for the train; had even, in pursuit of that amiable intention, stopped the car outside of town and had rolled and smoked three cigarettes. And the train had been late, too, after all!
When at last he got into the driving seat he found the girl beside him. He was not even faintly interested. He had had his own plans for that evening, plans which had involved a girl also; he had packed salt that day up into the mountains for the cattle there, and he had been in the saddle since five that morning. He had a night off coming to him. It was in infuriated silence that he had received his orders to meet the party, and in silence, rather less infuriated, that he drove it out to the L. D.
Only once did Kay speak during that long entranced ride.
"Do you live at the ranch?"
"Well, I kinda hit it and bounce off," he told her.
"And do you work with the cattle?"
"I play around with them some. Tame 'em, you know. They're easier to handle when they're tame."
"Really!" she said, and then caught a glimpse of his face and knew he was laughing at her.
But the enchantment continued, although she made no further effort to talk. There was a faint spicy odor in the air that she thought might be the sage, and a young moon hung in a cleft in the mountains. Above the purring of the engine an owl was calling, and a jack-rabbit ran for some time ahead of the car, long ears erect. He went incredibly fast, but the car kept up with him, and after a while her father spoke irritably from the back seat.
"What's the hurry?" he demanded. "We've been four days getting here; I don't want my neck broken now."
She thought, without looking, that McNair smiled again.
Then, after twenty odd miles, she saw lights again and knew they had reached the ranch. Just so must her grandfather have come back year after year, after he had gone East. First on horseback, then by coach and later on by car, he had turned the bend in the road and seen these lights and knew he was at home again. Very much the same too must have been the bustle of arrival; Mallory, the foreman, shaking hands, his wife in the background, men coming and going within the radius of the car lamps, voices, greetings, light streaming from the ranch house door. She felt strangely excited and emotional.
"We kept some supper hot, just in case you"
"We've had dinner, thank you."
"Then, if you'll just step in—I don't know where you'd like to put the other lady."
"My maid? I'll look around and see."
There was a narrow porch hung with creepers. The others went in slowly, as people do into strange houses. They passed Kay without seeing her, and she let them go by. Then, still breathless and constrained she went to the steps again, where Tom in the car was leaning back and rolling a cigarette.
"Thanks, very much," she said.
"What for?" he inquired, genuinely surprised.
"For bringing us out."
"And not breaking your neck, eh?"
But he smiled at her, and the smile warmed and even thrilled her.
"Good night, Mr. McNair."
"Good night."
As she turned to go into the house she heard his voice raised outside in the darkness:
"Hey! Some of you roughnecks come and get this baggage. I've been going since five this morning."